This Beautiful Life by Helen Schulman is a subtle study of society and family
in the internet age.

Helen Schulman’s novel about the catastrophic consequences of one reflex action is firmly based in The Slap territory. That bestseller was a crude, overlong attempt at exposing state of the nation mores; this is its subtle, erudite, and terse counterpart.

Liz and Richard Bergamot (even the name denotes fragrance) are a happily married couple with a lanky, gentle son, Jake, 15, and a prima donna-ish adopted six-year-old Chinese daughter, Coco. The family has not long relocated to Manhattan following years of content in Ithaca, upstate New York. While Coco and Richard relish their new, screechingly frenetic lifestyle, Liz, laid-back, occasional dope smoker, worrier, feels out of place among the Botoxed faces of the other mothers at Coco’s school.

Diffident Jake hangs around with a mixed crowd – even his supposed new best friend, Henry, makes him feel that “everything was always better… before he arrived”. Liz and Richard are both academics, but his career has taken precedence over hers, their move propelled by Richard’s meteoric promotion to a vice-chancellor post at a university planning to redevelop a deprived urban area. It is 2003; two years after 9/11, Richard needs to be one of the success stories in the city’s reinvigoration. He doesn’t lack confidence; although raised, like Liz, in a blue-collar family, he was nevertheless “a golden child who became a golden man”.

All this is called into question when Jake reluctantly attends the unsupervised party of Daisy, a wealthy, pudgy 13 year-old. After he refuses sex because she is too young, Daisy sends him an explicit email of herself simulating the act. Panicked, Jake forwards it to Henry; the email goes viral: the fallout, for all the Bergamots, has begun.

At this point the book accelerates but never lurches out of control. Gender politics, casual misogyny, the Bergamots’ stricken marriage are briskly handled. Though their children’s compromised innocence is shockingly highlighted, it is hard to empathise greatly with these privileged, slightly self-parodying lives. Schulman in particular seems enslaved to Jake’s vulnerability. Still, over each one yawns the unqualified loneliness of the behemoth that is the internet age, flaunting endless yet cruelly finite possibilities.